Presentations 101

By Gordon Rugg

Sooner or later, most students end up having to give a presentation. Most students hate giving presentations, with good reason.

The usual process goes something like this. Well before the date for the presentations, there is a lecture on how to do presentations. This lecture is usually worthy and well meaning, and consists largely of things that you knew already, plus advice like Make the presentation interesting, without telling you just how to do that. The lecture is usually accompanied by links to some of the many resources for doing presentations.

A lot of those resources are excellent in what they cover. However, they’re usually not so great in terms of what they don’t cover, whether because of space and time, or because they assume you already know it, or whatever.

In this article, I’m going to look at those absences. I’ll start with the big picture, then look at how to handle structure and content, and end with the practical stuff that makes the difference between doing it well and doing it not so well. Before I do that, here’s a picture of some hats.

Content analysis, part 2

By Gordon Rugg

Other types of content analysis

In a previous post, I gave a brief overview of a widely used, vanilla flavour type of content analysis. It’s far from the only type.

There are methodological debates about most things relating to content analysis, which have been running for the best part of a century, and which don’t look likely to end any time soon. There are, in consequence, numerous different types of content analysis, and many approaches to content analysis. The following sections give a very brief description of some of those other types. I’m planning to write in more detail about them at some point, when there’s nothing more exciting to do…

Liking, disliking, and averaging: Why average things are attractive but very attractive things are not average

By Gordon Rugg and Amy Martin

There are regularities in human desire. Often, though, the actual regularities are subtly but profoundly different from the apparent regularities.

In this article, we’ll look at one of these regularities. It starts with a significant insight from an article whose title neatly sums up a key finding, and implicitly raises a key question.

The article is a 1991 paper by Alley and Cunningham in Psychological Science. The title is: “Average faces are attractive, but very attractive faces are not average.” The implicit question is: “Why?”

There’s been a lot of work in this area. In this article, we’ll examine how a simple change in the way you represent the data can give powerful new insights into what’s actually going on, and into what you can do about it.